Freelance Writer

Last fall, every other week or so, I took the F subway train all the way to its last stop in Queens. Then I boarded the Q65 bus and took that all the way out to its last stop—a quiet, warehouse-lined street out by the water in College Point. When I arrived I was usually the only passenger left on board.

I was headed there to hang out with the guys who run Pharmapacks, a company that ships over 570,000 products every month selling on platforms including Amazon, eBay, and Walmart.com. For the past couple years I've been fascinated by the Amazon.com Marketplace. The site's bazaar of independent sellers generates nearly half the retail site's sales. It includes over two million sellers. Yet we, their customers, know almost nothing about who these sellers are and how they operate.

The entrepreneurs behind Pharmapacks — Andrew Vagenas, Jonathan Webb, Brad Tramunti, James Mastronardi, and Adam Berkowitz — kindly took me under their wing and showed me how they built this huge business selling on online platforms. In addition to being very clever guys, they were also some of the funniest entrepreneurs I've ever had the pleasure of writing about.

A couple weeks ago, my good friend Max Chafkin and I took a quasi-scientific look at three decades-worth of National Magazine Award-winning feature stories. How many had nut graphs? How many had swear words? Is it possible to use data to predict 2016's winner?

Thankfully, our prediction didn't come true (Kathryn Schulz won for The Really Big One). If it were so easy to pick a feature writing winner based on word count, swear words, and whether the story begins with an anecdotal lede, honestly I think I'd feel kind of depressed. Still, it was fun looking at whether masterful stories followed or disregarded various magazine conventions. I hope you enjoyed it.

Also, I ended up with a nice database of all the stories nominated for an ASME. If you've got other data-related questions, let me know and I'll try to take a look. I might post other stray observations about data and writing here in the future, too. Also—I'm deeply interested in learning more about how to do real data journalism. If you have any advice or ideas for me, please reach out.